Animation duplication for multiple objects
Shape key animation




Set origin at point of nail.
Make a simple shapekey, moving whole mesh in edit mode to "fully
nailed". Origin is at head of nail for this shapekey.
Orient the nail anywhere, Need only animate the value of the shapekey, from 0 to 1.  


The nail in image is animated to nail in local Z direction... The nail object is rotated -90degs about Y axis.  should have put local axis on it I suppose.

Drivers

An interesting take on this is to use drivers (make sure that prefs &gt; save &amp; load &gt; auto run python scripts is checked)

Copy the script below, paste into text editor and click run script. To have it run automatically when blend file is opened, name it nail.py and check register.



import bpy

dns = bpy.app.driver_namespace

def nail(start, end, frame):
    if frame &lt; start:
        return 0
    elif frame &gt;= end:
        return 1
    else: 
        return (frame - start) / (end - start)

dns["nail"] = nail


Now in the value property of a nail can type in

#nail(10, 50, frame)


to have a nail start nailing in at frame 10 and finish at 50.



Now we can copy the nail, move it somewhere else,  and change the numbers in the driver to change when the nail gets nailed.

This may be a bit "out there", but is an example of there are many ways to skin a cat with blender.